Unix Review takes a look at KDissert. "Somewhere in my head, there's a jumble of fleeting thoughts, ideas, and concepts, running every which way with no map for me to follow other than some casual mental digging here and there. If you find yourself in the same kind of cerebral jungle, what you and I really need is a mind map. Thomas Nagy's KDissert is an application referred to as a mind mapping tool. Its purpose is to help you create complex documents such as a thesis, or a dissertation, or a presentation."

Comments

As a KOffice hacker, I am somewhat affronted when I see things like that. OpenDocument is a file format that is intended to ensure total vendor interoperability - it's NOT only the OpenOffice file format. I couldn't find anywhere to comment on the article, so please help me stamp out misconceptions like this, everybody.

I wish there was a mind map mode in KDissert. Isn't this what it already does, you might ask, but no. KDissert is designed to allow only strict tree structure in the graph, allowing it to eventually output the text as a linear document.

I wish there was, in addition to the tree branches, the possibility to add "soft" edges, connecting nodes in any combination. There could be edges in different colours; directed and undirected edges and edges with labels. This would not break the previous functionality, but allow KDissert to be used also for other purposes than document production.

I have looked at other tools that do this, but found none to be satisfactory.

this really needs to be exposed much better. keep the control key shortcut, but for the love of god[dess], add another button to the toolbar! i've also discovered that it's a little obtuse to new kdissert users how to begin adding items ...

now all we need is to make the drawing of the connectoins prettier (arthur's improved support for things like AA and alpha will go a long way here) and make customizing connections nicer (e.g. allowing one to give them custom colors, tag them, etc).

kdissert is a very promising app (i use it regularly myself these days). a good ui review could do it handsomely at this point.

Personally I like BasKet ( http://basket.kde.org/ ). Not quite the same, but in the same general realm of application. The betas of 0.6.x are stable and way way more impressive than 0.5.x. If you haven't used it, play with it a bit... it features unobtrusive fancy effects that really seem integrated. If all apps worked like it in KDE 4, I'd be happy.